Two Hunters

This rough and potent offering from rural Washington State combines black metal ferocity with operatic post-rock.

Most of the arguments I've heard in the past three months about Two Hunters, the excellent and sprawling second album from Olympia, Wash., metal band Wolves in the Throne Room, have been divergent echoes of extremism. Those who take Burzum's best black metal as an unholy grail argue that Wolves' black-metal half-- characterized by impenetrably fast drums, focused guitars and ferocious, muffled vocals-- is competent enough, if somewhat standard. Meanwhile, those who've heard of the record's operatic, post-rock menace-- serpentine female vocals where most bands would put keyboards and gauzy keyboards where most bands would be countering guitar arpeggios-- find Two Hunters compositionally imperfect, lined with missed opportunities a smarter band would have recognized. And those eager for a successful post-rock/black-metal merger find that Two Hunters-- which more often bleeds one dichotomous idea into the next rather than stack them into one dense moment-- isn't that album.

But none of this really matters, whether you're trying to understand Wolves in the Throne Room as a band or enjoy one of the best-paced post-rock or most well-tempered black metal albums you've ever heard. Wolves in the Throne Room-- two brothers and a friend who share a sylvan dwelling and a plot of self-sustaining land outside of Olympia-- aren't really into compromise or expectations. In interviews, they've said they're "not black metal, or, more accurately we play black metal on our own terms" and "I don't know what post-rock is." They've declared that they don't think of themselves as a progression in the grand black metal scheme, so post-black metal labels need not apply. They've publicly damned their need to tour in a van, to maintain a MySpace page, to sign to a record label. "We'll see how long we can keep it up before we retire to our farm," the trio told Ultimate Metal's Jason Jordan in a surprisingly candid 2006 interview. "A loud voice in my head tells me that we should only play this music on the winter solstice, drunk on mead and cider, burning torches to remind us of the long-forgotten sun." Like the band's polytheistic sound, such a Cincinnatian attitude could be seen as ambivalent or even irreverent: Do you want to be a band or a bunch of farmers? Do you want to nod at black metal or do you want to play it? Do you really want your guitar player to ignore the obvious chord change on the beautiful "Cleansing", or do you want to perfect your umpteen-minute broods?

Actually, that's about right: Two Hunters is mostly indifferent to conventions, or at least their corollaries. The black metal portions of "Vastness and Sorrow" indeed sound like U.S. black metal, and the instrumental middle third of the same track sounds like Pelican with sharper talons, bigger wings, and a pacemaker. But the record's real power emerges from the subtle bleeding between the memes, not to mention their stark juxtaposition. The metal moments come in long, grand, ferocious sweeps that keep everything in motion, and the instrumental moments often seem truncated or incomplete because they're interested in the same sort of motion, always seeking the next stop. Nothing's precious or perfected on Two Hunters. It's rough and potent, even when guest vocalist Jessica Kinney delivers its most beautiful moment with her lullaby aria on "Cleansing". After all, it's a record about the world ending so it can begin anew. If the world's ending-- and Wolves in the Throne Room believes it is-- that missed chord on "Cleansing" is trivial.

And there's no better example than closer "I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots". It uses the rest of the record as its prototype, its dynamics serving as catapults and its pace implying wars and fires and rescues and rebirths. It eases in, guitar notes hanging over zephyr synthesizers that are effective if trite. One chord stops short, and the pounding drums and roaring guitars doze everything. Five minutes in, the double bass drum pushes the envelope, then disappears, sheets of guitar feedback intertwining. The moment is broken by another surge, all militaristic march and tortured yowls. It melts away, returns and melts away again. Only the guitars are left to slink around Kinney's voice. She fades, too, leaving field recordings of birdsong and wind. Its work done on one of the year's most singular, unflinching records, Wolves in the Throne Room return to the farm, expecting fire and floods, with the wars of extremists raging at their backs.